When our firm, Orefice & Caliri CPAs, got serious about switching our clients over to QBO, I worked out some best practices for streamlining set up procedures for our team and our clients. One trick I learned is how to use the Bookmark Manager in Chrome to scale QBO bookmarks across our firm and clients’ Chrome user accounts. This nifty little tool also allows you to view, sort and edit your bookmarks in a convenient dashboard, but what I love most about it is the import/export feature.

As you probably already know, you can create multiple Chrome “People” for every Chrome user account. And you also know that creating a dedicated QBO “person” is best practice for QBO users because only QBO “cookies” will be saved in the unique person’s settings, and this can help you to avoid browser performance issues. This article will walk you through the process of setting up a QBO Chrome person, customizing the Bookmark bar and exporting and importing the bookmarks to be used in other Chrome accounts.

Step 1: Create a new Chrome Person

To create a new Person, click at the top right of the browser window and choose Settings – then scroll down a bit on the settings page until you see People. Click Add person…and choose an icon to be associated with the new Person, you can also choose to add a desktop shortcut for the new user and pin it to the taskbar in Windows.

Once you’ve you created your new Person, a new Chrome browser window will open – giving you a new bookmark canvas to customize! Tip: If you don’t see the Bookmark bar in the new window, click Ctrl+Shift+B to show it.

Step 2: Customize your Bookmarks

Your next step is to create your Bookmarks and organize them. To create Bookmarks, navigate to the screen you want to bookmark and then click the star at the far right of the address bar. You can save the bookmark directly on the bar, or if you want to create drop down menus on your Bookmark bar, right click on the Bookmark bar and then choose Add folder. You can even drag the bookmarks into the order you want both on the bar and inside the folders by right clicking on them.

Step 3: Export your Bookmarks

Once you have created your bookmarks, you can easily export your bookmarks to an html file. Click Ctrl+Shift+O to open the Bookmark Manager. Then click Organize > Export bookmarks to an html file… When the save window opens, browse to the location on your computer where you want to save the file – make sure you save your file to a place you can easily find it and give the file a meaningful name – I have a folder on my desktop where I keep mine.

Step 4: Import your Bookmarks

Now that you’ve exported your bookmarks to an html file, they are ready to be scaled to clients or others that can use them to navigate within QuickBooks Online! You can send the files to others via email or store them in a shared cloud drive like DropBox or Sharefile. Before you import the bookmarks to a new Chrome user, your best practice will be to create a new QBO-only Chrome person on the computer that will be used. Once you’ve created the new user, you will most likely see a message in the Bookmark bar prompting you to import your bookmarks. Click on the link, then choose Bookmarks html file as the import type, then click Choose file. Browse to your saved html file from Step 3 and click Open.

Like magic, your beloved bookmarks will populate across your Bookmark bar! A quick note – if you already have bookmarks on your bar when you select the import function, the bookmark file will create a new folder on the bar that you can then organize using the Bookmark Manager.